Thursday, February 11, 2016

Listening for echoes

Almost fifteen years ago, after a visit to the former Church
of St. Etienne, which is now a museum, in Beaugency, France, I wrote:

Echoes of voices

Resounding from hard walls

Hard floors,

A space full of echoes of life.

The former Church of St. Etienne

An unsmiling woman,

Proud beauty weighed with the cares
of years;

Ripe fields, bright flowers –

Echoes of life,

Refracted from eye and hand of
artist.

Built for echoes,

Echoes of the unseen,

Heard in water and bread and wine
and light,

With a voice that echoed across the
centuries

And echoes even now.

Few if any

Hear the ever so soft
reverberations,

As they see and feel these new

Echoes of life.

Lent is a time to listen for the echoes, to hear a word (or
music) of life in the spaces of our lives that seem empty, perhaps even
deserted, spaces that we preserve museum-like, unwilling to fill them but
unsure of why we keep them. And in those echoes, one can sometimes experience
anew an elusive love, a force that draws us more deeply into the elusive
mystery at the heart of life.

What spiritual discipline have you chosen to practice this Lent to help you hear the echoes of the divine?